Villa-Lobos - String Quartet No. 17

String Quartet No. 17, A. 537 (1957) I. Allegro non troppo II. Lento III. Scherzo, allegro vivace IV. Allegro vivace (con fuoco) Cuarteto Latinoamericano A year before his death in 1958, Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos confessed: "I love to write quartets. One could say that this is a mania." So it seemed: the year before, he had just completed his String Quartet No. 17 -- one more than Beethoven! -- and by the time he passed away, he would leave the world with drafts for yet another. In the event he left anyone wondering, in any case, the Seventeenth is an ideal if unintended capstone to a surprisingly idiosyncratic body of quartets, as substantial as any in the twentieth century. Like much of Villa-Lobos' music, these quartets are both fusions of two different traditions -- the European chamber music heritage and the panoply of folk musics in Brazil -- and also gentle reversals of both. Unlike folk music, Villa-Lobos' quartets are classically structured four-movement works employing learned tools (polyphony, polyrhythm, bitonality, and heavy chromaticism); but unlike European classical music work (like that of Beethoven, or Haydn and Mozart), Villa-Lobos' quartets are magically untethered to developmental and unifying formal and thematic principles. Instead, Villa-Lobos' quartets seem to work "aphoristically" and "kaleidoscopically": they hone self-sustained bursts of invention and slowly rotate or quickly splice into wholly new ones. This might be misinterpreted as feeble compositional discipline were it not so thorough and consistent. And confident: the Seventeenth, in particular, convinces from its sheer self-assuredness. Blithely transparent in its moments and complex in its accumulation of such different moments, it creates a flow from self-interruptions and shines a spotlight on the composer's own astonishingly unfettered imagination. This is perhaps best heard in the snatches of older pieces (of Villa-Lobos' own) that wander through the entire score like happy ghosts. The first movement's brazen tangents eventually make way for the "Canto do capadocio" from the composer's famous Bachianas brasilieras No. 2, and later invite a motive from the solo piano "Lenda do caboclo." Likewise, the slow movement quotes a Villa-Lobos song, his Samba classico, and the finale even beckons some foreign, though pan-American influence in its shades of George Gershwin and of African American blues. Along the way, Villa-Lobos continues his patent gift for tranforming ostinati from mere accompaniments into the actual content of a moment; similarly, he somehow reverses the foregrounding of melodies by giving them stunningly bare chordal accompaniment. The result is mystical in its very simplicity: the music hides behind no scrim, but contentedly pours forth its content. [allmusic.com] Art by Aldo Bahamonde

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